PARAKEETS AND PARCHESI
567
Nehru does not idly declaim when he says that his people will not bar–
gain over famine, nor does a proof that intransigence on Kashmir is
"against Indian interests" carry very deep into an Indian mind.
\
Against the velvet blackness of the Indian context, the non-Indian
is abstracted into a type. We Whites observe that all Negroes (or
Chinese or Japanese or Polynesians) look so much alike that it is hard
to see how mother can recognize child, or bride her lover. So, in the
Vedantic frame, do those cherished differences that define the separate
essences of our Western egos, drop one by one away. By the last day of
the Bombay Congress for Cultural Freedom/ from among the foreign
delegation only Max Yergan, the Negro sociologist, was, thanks to his
dark skin, distinctive and distinguishable. The soft, doughy faces from
Europe and America were a single batch of half-cooked biscuits. Tall
Stephen Spender, with his schoolboy hair, looked the twin of that spry
and mischievous ancient, Don Salvador de Madariaga.
My good wife, made unique for me by all the specialties of seven–
teen married years, has always struck me as among the last candidates for
Mrs. American Matron. But we stopped one day at the foot of :in
open stairway that mounted
to
a ledge on a hill where the eagles had
once brought food to the hungry Rama, and where, ever since and now,
at exactly eleven each morning, two eagles come from the sky to receive
their food in return. It was (it always was) inappeasably hot, and all
the levels of the stairway were peopled with vendors of religious car–
toons and scrolls, water-sellers, beggars, holy men, cripples, children, and
pilgrims making their ascent. As we walked up, the only "Europeans,"
the beggars or merchants
in
our nearer environs took up their formal
chants, or wails, and the sari-wrapped, nose-jeweled women flowed
softly up toward where the eagles would soon alight. I looked up from
a bearer of curious jars, and found that Marcia had disappeared, or
rather been transmogrified into an anonymous universal White distilled
from all the novels and the stories of the East. There she was, stepped
from the assembly-line, pale skin, grossly tall and large, wide hat, high
shoes, bulging purse, too open eyes, puffed broad-skirted dress in place
of secretively wrapped and introspective sari, even the camera in hand.
The reduction to type extended from visible appearance to mind
1.
The immediate occasion of my trip to India was an invitation to attend the
Indian Congress for Cultural Freedom, which took place in Bombay during the
last week of March of this year. The other Americans and Europeans whom I
mention here and further on were also among the guest delegates to this
Congress.
